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The Children of Men. - book reviews
Christian Century, May 19, 1993 by S. Mark Heim
THE YEAR IS 2021. No one is younger than 25. The millennium brought an apocalypse, but a quiet one. Suddenly, inexplicably, completely, humanity has lost the power to conceive. So things stand in P. D. James's most recent novel, a striking departure from the elegant mysteries that have endeared her to readers and Masterpiece Theatre viewers. The religious themes well seeded in her earlier books flower with bright intensity in this story of eschatology and redemption.
We enter on New Year's Day, when newspapers report that "the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl" and James's narrator begins to keep a journal. He is Theodore Faron, an Oxford history don teaching sparsely attended adult education seminars. He is divorced, haunted by responsibility for the death of his infant daughter, and the cousin and childhood confidante of the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiat. A kind of Lord Protector of the latter days, Xan rules absolutely through a mix of media populism and state security police.
The warden's England is a stable realm, its democratically installed dictator plotting an orderly way to turn out the lights in a darkening house. But the everyday landscape of London and Lake Country is crossed with eerie shadows: wandering groups of flagellants, outlaw bands of the last generation who have taken to living wild and capturing victims for human sacrifice, mass government-assisted suicides in which the old and the halt are drugged, floated out to sea in barges and sunk, to the sound of bands playing "Abide with Me."
Quite inadvertently, Theo falls into acquaintance with a quixotic resistance movement and into love with Julian, one of its members. "The Five," whose sign is the fish, are an unlikely group, including Miriam, a rusty midwife, and Luke, a rather ineffectual oldline Anglican priest, as well as Julian's husband, Rolf. They oppose the suicide rituals (to the point of blowing up the embarkation docks in advance of the events), the exploitation of immigrant guest workers imported to keep society going, and the exile of criminals to an unsupervised state of nature on the Isle of Man.
In countless concrete glimpses the novel incarnates its simple premise: no more babies. Violent crime has fallen off, with few young people and increasing surpluses of most things one would want to steal. In Theo's Oxford the university is arguing over whether it is worth refacing the crumbling Sheldonian Theatre. Museums are laying down the great paintings, rigging themselves as mausoleums to preserve literature and music a few silent centuries for possible visitors from another planet. The scientific material hardly appears to merit saving: for planetary visitors it would seem primitive or uselessly tailored to parochial--and now vanished--organisms. People are gradually withdrawing from the country villages, pulling back to the urban centers where the warden has promised that services will be maintained to the end.
Children's playgrounds have been made over into pocket parks, the less to pain passers-by. Strict laws govern the reproduction of pets so that their numbers will not overwhelm their dwindling masters. Bitter custody battles are not unknown. The government enforces regular testing of all men's sperm, and women under 45 are likewise examined. If good seed should be found, it must have the optimal hosts. State-sponsored porn shops stoke a somewhat faltering fire. It is all rather perfunctory.
THE SUPREME scientific challenge to a race contemplating its jump to the stars has come with shattering swiftness, striking at resources so common their fragility was obscured: time and descendants. For a while people expected a breakthrough. Institutes were created, and all research money and personnel diverted to a single end. Nations jockeyed for the ultimate advantage. But hope has become unusual. The ranks of lab researchers are thinning; education has steadily shut down from the nurseries upward.
For some reason our visions of the end of humanity tend to focus on externals: asteroids, nuclear war, ecological disaster. We imagine humanity, intact and functioning, being killed off or dying out. But in James's world humans simply stop coming in. Within the massive shell of our civilizations and our knowledge, this small defect, the slightest change, one that affects nothing we do or see or feel, spells the end. The helplessness of humanity has suddenly an absurd obviousness. With all its cleverness, Theo observes, humanity can no longer do what the animals do without thought. It is as if nature encountered an enormous robot, part computer of unimagined power, part mechanism with unlimited adaptability, and casually pulled its plug.
The religious responses to this situation are sketched deftly. There is no great rush to faith. One younger man tells Theo, "Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope He bums in His own held."
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